In this short comedy, Luís Vaz
de Camões, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while
engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows
the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem s
Lusíadas. He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by
allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell,
where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.

Director’s Note

Camões was the first
European poet to have an extended experience in Africa, India and Indochina. He
wrote Os Lusíadas while he was exiled in the Indes, a poem that
glorifies the Portuguese navigators that departed from Lusitanian shores and
traveled to Taprobana, now known as Sri Lanka.

Many myths surround
Camões’ voyages, and one in particular was an inspiration for this film. It has
Camões falling in love with a Chinese courtesan, which he then baptized with a
Greek nymph’s name: Dinamene. The myth goes on to have Camões and Dinamene
imprisoned on a boat to Goa and suffering a shipwreck. Supposedly his lover
drowned, as Camões was too busy swimming after his manuscript.

Taprobana is intended as a poetic and absurd
satire about this contradictory and charming character; a European exiled in
the Indes, but obsessed with his homeland; an iconoclast rapscallion that wrote
some of the most sublime verses of the Portuguese language, where spiritual
illumination is inextricable from sexual apotheosis.

Gabriel Abrantes - Director / Producer

Gabriel
Abrantes (b.1984) is an artist and filmmaker who has produced a significant
body of work in film since studying at The Cooper Union, L’ École National des
Beaux-Arts and Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Abrantes is
the winner of several prizes, including the Golden Leopard for Best
International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival 2010 for his film A
History of Mutual Respect. His films have premiered at festivals such as La
Biennale di Venezia, Locarno, Toronto. He has exhibited since 2002 in museums
such as the MIT:List Center for the Arts in Boston, Palais de Tokyo in Paris,
Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, and Museu Serralves in Porto

Jani Zhao -Actress

Jani Zhao
(1992) is a Portuguese actress of Chinese descent. She studied at Teatro Escola
Proficional de Cascais, and from early on has established a career in modeling
and acting. She has been one of the title characters in a number of Portuguese
television productions, such as Floribella, Rebelde Way, Morangos
com Açucar and Sentimentos. She has also worked on stage
productions, such as Dead End by Jorge Andrade, premiered at Maria Matos
Theatre, in Lisbon. She is currently acting on a new T.V. production in Luanda,
Angola.

Natxo Checa -Actor / Producer

Natxo Checa is a curator and
producer based in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2009 he was the curator of the
Portuguese Pavillon at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, working with João Maria
Gusmão and Pedro Paiva on their exhibition: “Experiments and Observations on
Different Kinds Of Air”. Since 1994 he has worked as a curator and producer at
Galeria Zé dos Bois. His main concern is to develop an intimate relationship
with certain artists’ practices by accompanying the entire process from
research to fieldwork, production to exhibition. His interdisciplinary approach
to curating and production is what has led him to produce Abrantes’ films, work
as a cinematographer on a number of Abrantes’ projects, as well as act in of
the main roles of Taprobana.

Producers

A Mutual Respect
Productions -Production Company

A Mutual Respect is
a film production company established in 2010 in Lisbon by Gabriel Abrantes,
Natxo Checa and Associação Zé dos Bois. Its main ambition is to find
alternative and flexible means to produce moving image based works and films of
an innovative and experimental nature.

ZDB (Marta
Furtado / Joana Botelho) -Producer

Zé dos Bois (ZDB) is
a non-profit cultural association. It has functioned as a cultural center, in
the center of Lisbon, since 1994. It has served as a platform for the creation,
production and exhibition of contemporary art exhibitions, performance, drama,
cinema, music and artistic residencies. It has collaborated with artists such
as: João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino, Kenneth
Anger, Patrícia Portela, Animal Collective, John Romão, Alexandre Estrela, Jean
Baudrillard, and Emory Douglas.

Vimukthi
Jayasundara -Producer

Vimukthi Jayasundara
is an award-winning Sri Lankan film director, screenwriter and visual artist.
His first feature, The Forsaken Land (2005) won the Caméra d’Or at the
2005 Cannes Film Festival, making him the only Sri Lankan to win the award. He
followed this with Between Two Worlds (2009) which got nominated for the
Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival 2009. Vimukthi’s third
feature, Mushrooms (2011) was filmed in India and went on to be selected for
the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival 2011.

CPH: DOX /
DOX:LAB -Producer

DOX:LAB is
CPH:DOX’s international film production program launched in 2009. A laboratory
for creativity and artistic exchange, where selected filmmakers are paired in teams
of two and given carte blanche and a grant to make a film. The experiment has
been an overwhelming success with films selected for film festivals like Berlin
and Venice, as well as Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Toronto and Locarno.

From the outset, Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt’s Palácios de Pena establishes for itself a sense of veiled purpose, effecting a curious disjuncture in both narrative and form. Sumptuously, meticulously photographed; cinematic; yet curiously at odds with its conventional mantle, it dances between feature film and long-form artist’s work, never quite allowing itself to be pinned by either trope.

The film’s protagonists, a group of teenage girls, maintain a louche, cool, strangely distant relationship with one another, and with the narrative itself, somehow at once within and beyond the world which is constructed for us – for them – as if reluctant to submit entirely to the fiction. The effect of distanciation that this produces, whether intentional or merely an artefact of the artists wielding the tools of the feature film director (that is, at something of a remove himself), or of the loss of a layer of linguistic codes in translation and subtitling, is one of an ‘othering’: as with the actresses themselves, the dialogue is aware of itself, and becomes to an extent self-reflexive, its words ‘othered’. It is almost as if the girls are speaking lines from another film. Their words fall heavy.

Providing the framework for this sparse dialogue, in the film’s opening scene, is a richly symbolic space; a large, empty sports stadium. It is an arena for spectatorship, for contest, for competition. The girls navigate the space at first, it seems, without any of the usual components of a game we might expect to see in such a stadium. Ball, racquets, sticks, crowd are absent, and the girls instead run and dive together, awkwardly denuded of the bald accroutements of sport – those instruments which would complete the loop of meaning suggested by the stadium location – playful yet aggressive, strangely balletic. And the film’s other spaces, as they appear, are similarly symbolic: a high concrete enclosure, a dam, a stone tower, a rock escarpment overlooking the sea.

The interdeterminacy of space, it seems, is a theme that Abrantes & Schmidt use throughout the film – the withholding of meaning; the free interchange of signification – to great effect, given (indeed, because of) the conventional format he has chosen. Where we might expect to see closed sets of meanings presented within a taut, linear narrative, the artists play, presenting a multiplicity of meanings, momentarily, before closing the loop.

Framed entirely by women, aside, surely pointedly, from a dream about men, and the errors of men, in the cast of amoral ‘chorus’, troubled moral individual, wild seer, and sage-like figure (‘Little Grandma’, the dreamer) presiding over all, Palácios de Pena follows a fabulous (in the strict sense of the word) narrative which recalls – not only, ineluctably, for their association with Portugal, for thefado drifting across the frame – the magic realism of Eugène Green’s A Portuguese Nun or John Berger’s Here is Where we Meet; also the utopian spaces of Tarkovsky; the cruelty of Haneke. It examines a similar liminality: of the space between wakefulness and sleep, reality and dream, morality and amorality, life and death. It is no surprise, perhaps, that its main protagonists are teenagers, navigating that dangerous time between the amoral and moral, child and adult: a time for and of cruelty. It lives in the interval, in the black space, at death itself, perhaps. But it exists on its own, too, in a state of magical suspension.

Beyond the draw of its narrative, though, Palácios de Pena – indeed Abrantes’ other work – is interesting in the context of the recuperation of narrative in artists’ moving image after the ascetic purges of Structuralism. Its very length, too, at an hour, consigns it to an indeterminate, uneasy category – something almost subversive for a work with so ostensibly straightforward a method.

It is emblematic, perhaps, of a new fluidity in artists’ moving image practice and, beyond the recuperation of narrative, which is after all well-established, suggests – as Ben Rivers and certain others move towards longer-form work – a challenge to the commercial, conventional form of feature film itself which goes beyond the assimilative strategies of Steve McQueen, Gillian Wearing and others. That is, it demands to use those most conventional of the tropes of commercial feature film yet remain outside of the (arguably decayed) industrial model of production and mainstream distribution network.

Adam Pugh

Palácios de Pena will be screened alongside two other collaborative works by Abrantes.

Gabriel Abrantes early film Olympia I & II will follow the screening of two ambitious new works – Liberdade and Palacios de Pena – in his solo programme on 22 & 25 October. The artist will be present to introduce and take questions on these works, which were made in collaboration with Katie Widlowski, Benjamin Crotty and Daniel Schmidt.

To accompany two new films by Gabriel Abrantes, Olympia I & II (2008) is revisited to delve deeper into the way this artists treats his characters’ attitudes towards sex, sexuality and power. Abrantes and Katie Widlowski explicitly reference Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) through the title and the visual composition of the frame. Their use of 16mm film heightens the painterly qualities of the work: the saturated colours, the grainy make-up, the smoothness of the porcelain skin of Olympia and the velvet cushions and feathery flowers caressing her body.

Despite the art historical context, the work does not get lost in aesthetics. The twisted and verbally aggressive interaction of Olympia I contrasts with the sickly sweet homoerotic conversation that leads to intercourse between transvestite Olympia and his maid in Olympia II. Both films evoke the characters’ sadness and bitterness towards life and their psychological cracks hit the viewer emotionally.

Marina Ribera

Palacios de Pena (Palaces of Pity) received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival 2011. Here’s the trailer :-

A Mutual Respect is a film production company established in 2010 in Lisbon. It's main ambition is to find alternative and flexible means to produce moving image based works and films of an innovative and experimental nature.